How Expensive It Is to Be Poor

[n2doc]

Earlier this month, the Pew Research Center released a study that found that most wealthy Americans believed “poor people today have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything in return.”

This is an infuriatingly obtuse view of what it means to be poor in this country — the soul-rending omnipresence of worry and fear, of weariness and fatigue. This can be the view only of those who have not known — or have long forgotten — what poverty truly means.

“Easy” is a word not easily spoken among the poor. Things are hard — the times are hard, the work is hard, the way is hard. “Easy” is for uninformed explanations issued by the willfully callous and the haughtily blind.

Allow me to explain, as James Baldwin put it, a few illustrations of “how extremely expensive it is to be poor.”

more
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/19/opinion/charles-blow-how-expensive-it-is-to-be-poor.html?_r=0

[daleanime]

1. K&R....

[BlueJazz]

2. I've actually asked people: "If the poor are having it so easy because of Government benefits...,

...why are there so many homeless poor?" (I usually hear crickets)

[Bettie]

3. I often get

"They're homeless because they want to be!"

or

"They're not really homeless, they live in nicer houses than you and I do, but they pretend to live in their cars."

Really.

I get these responses.

Because oftentimes, people really, really suck.

[progressoid]

4. They're all drug addicts.

Someone told me that. Then he backed off and said that 90% were.

[Bettie]

5. And the other 10% are the ones who

WANT to be homeless!

See, we're figuring out how the right wing mind works....or doesn't.